University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.
THE APOLLINEAN INSTITUTE.
(With Extracts from the “Report of the Committee.”)

The readers of this narrative will hardly expect
any elaborate details of the educational
management of the Apollinean Institute. They
cannot be supposed to take the same interest in
its affairs as was shown by the Annual Committees
who reported upon its condition and prospects.
As these Committees were, however, an
important part of the mechanism of the establishment,
some general account of their organization
and a few extracts from the Report of the
one last appointed may not be out of place.

Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance
for packing his Committees, whether they
happened always to be made up of optimists by
nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor
by polite attentions, or whether they were
always really delighted with the wonderful acquirements
of the pupils and the admirable order
of the school, it is certain that their Annual Reports

were couched in language which might
warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and calculating
father that ever had a family of daughters
to educate. In fact, these Annual Reports
were considered by Mr. Peckham as his most
effective advertisements.

The first thing, therefore, was to see that the
Committee was made up of persons known to
the public. Some worn-out politician, in that
leisurely and amiable transition-state which comes
between official extinction and the paralysis which
will finish him as soon as his brain gets a little
softer, made an admirable Chairman for Mr. Peckham,
when he had the luck to pick up such an
article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are
more prized in the grassy than in the stony districts.
An effete celebrity, who would never be
heard of again in the great places until the funeral
sermon waked up his memory for one parting
spasm, finds himself in full flavor of renown
a little farther back from the changing winds of
the sea-coast. If such a public character was not
to be had, so that there was no chance of heading
the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr.
Somebody, the next best thing was to get the
Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous
position. Then would follow two or three
local worthies with Esquire after their names.
If any stray literary personage from one of the
great cities happened to be within reach, he was
pounced upon by Mr. Silas Peckham. It was a

hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a
hundred miles or two to the outside suburbs after
peace and unwatered milk, to be pumped for a
speech in this unexpected way. It was harder
still, if he had been induced to venture a few
tremulous remarks, to be obliged to write them
out for the “Rockland Weekly Universe,” with
the chance of seeing them used as an advertising
certificate as long as he lived, if he lived as long
as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving his
certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic
Snuff.

The Report of the last Committee had been
signed by the Honorable —, late — of
—, as Chairman. (It is with reluctance that
the name and titles are left in blank; but our public
characters are so familiarly known to the whole
community that this reserve becomes necessary.)
The other members of the Committee were the
Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town,
who was to make the prayer before the Exercises
of the Exhibition, and two or three notabilities
of Rockland, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous,
bumpless foreheads. A few extracts from the
Report are subjoined: —

The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard
more good than a week's vacation would have
done. It gave him such a laugh as he had not
had for a month. The way in which Silas Peckham
had made his Committee say what he wanted
them to — for he recognized a number of expressions
in the Report as coming directly from the
lips of his principal, and could not help thinking
how cleverly he had forced his phrases, as jugglers
do the particular card they wish their dupe
to take — struck him as particularly neat and
pleasing.

He had passed through the sympathetic and
emotional stages in his new experience, and had
arrived at the philosophical and practical state,
which takes things coolly, and goes to work to
set them right. He had breadth enough of view
to see that there was nothing so very exceptional
in this educational trader's dealings with
his subordinates, but he had also manly feeling
enough to attack the particular individual instance
of wrong before him. There are plenty
of dealers in morals, as in ordinary traffic, who
confine themselves to wholesale business. They
leave the small necessity of their next-door neighbor

to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics
and general facts, but richer in the every-day charities.
Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who
sees a gray rat steal out of a drain and begin
gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with
fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he
is let alone. The first impulse is to murder him
with the nearest ragged stone. Then one remembers
that he is a rodent, acting after the law
of his kind, and cools down and is contented to
drive him off and guard the tree against his teeth
for the future. As soon as this is done, one can
watch his attempts at mischief with a certain
amusement.

This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had
gone through. First, the indignant surprise of a
generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into
relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of
extermination, — a divine instinct, intended to
keep down vermin of all classes to their working
averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return
of cheerful tolerance, — a feeling, that, if the
Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could;
with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers
and honest men would have the upperhand,
and a grateful consciousness that he had been
sent just at the right time to come between a
patient victim and the master who held her in
peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do,
Mr. Bernard was as good-natured and hopeful as

ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional
training, of knowing how to recognize
and deal with the nervous disturbances to which
overtasked women are so liable. He saw well
enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill
herself or lose her wits, if he could not lighten
her labors and lift off a large part of her weight
of cares. The worst of it was, that she was one
of those women who naturally overwork themselves,
like those horses who will go at the top
of their pace until they drop. Such women are
dreadfully unmanageable. It is as hard reasoning
with them as it would have been reasoning with
Io, when she was flying over land and sea, driven
by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he
played. Under one innocent pretext or another,
he invaded this or that special province she had
made her own. He would collect the themes
and have them all read and marked, answer all
the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the
other teachers come to him for directions, and in
this way gradually took upon himself not only all
the general superintendence that belonged to his
office, but stole away so many of the special
duties which might fairly have belonged to his
assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking
better and feeling more cheerful than for many
and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any
bodily cause, or exhausted by overworking, there

follow effects which have often been misinterpreted
by moralists, and especially by theologians.
The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes
actually inflamed, so that the least touch is
agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick
conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable.
The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose
life has been given to unselfish labors, who has
filled a place which it seems to others only an
angel would make good, reproaches herself with
incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble
Christian, who has been a model to others, calls
himself a worm of the dust on one page of his
diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming
short of the perfection of an archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing
can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that
he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has
goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India
are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides
of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable
hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died
like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are
crammed with books written by spiritual hypochondriacs,
who inspected all their moral secretions
a dozen times a day. They are full of interest,
but they should be transferred from the shelf of
the theologian to that of the medical man who
makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work

and too much responsibility were bringing Helen
Darley, when the new master came and lifted so
much of the burden that was crushing her as
must be removed before she could have a chance
to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy.
Many of the noblest women, suffering like her,
but less fortunate in being relieved at the right
moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual
teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience.
So subtile is the line which separates the true
and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but
exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which
is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body,
that it is no wonder they are often confounded.
And thus many good women are suffered to perish
by that form of spontaneous combustion in
which the victim goes on toiling day and night
with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at
once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her,
she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they
overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes
the sense of duty, — as the draught of the locomotive's
furnace blows stronger and makes the
fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along
the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning
of this chapter, that we shall trouble ourselves
a great deal about the internal affairs of
the Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in
the nature of things, not so very unlike each other
as to require a minute description for each particular

one among them. They have all very much
the same general features, pleasing and displeasing.
All feeding-establishments have something
odious about them, — from the wretched country-houses
where paupers are farmed out to the lowest
bidder, up to the commons-tables at colleges,
and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's
appetite should be at war with no other
purse than his own. Young people, especially,
who have a bone-factory at work in them, and
have to feed the living looms of innumerable
growing tissues, should be provided for, if possible,
by those who love them like their own flesh
and blood. Elsewhere their appetites will be sure
to make them enemies, or, what are almost as
bad, friends whose interests are at variance with
the claims of their exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard
to the most sacred interests of life are hateful
even to those who profit by them. The clergyman,
the physician, the teacher, must be paid;
but each of them, if his duty be performed in
the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of disgust
when money is counted out to him for administering
the consolations of religion, for saving some
precious life, for sowing the seeds of Christian
civilization in young, ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial
French and their mechanical accomplishments,
with their cheap parade of diplomas and commencements

and other public honors, have an
ever fresh interest to all who see the task they are
performing in our new social order. These girls
are not being educated for governesses, or to be
exported, with other manufactured articles, to
colonies where there happens to be a surplus of
males. Most of them will be wives, and every
American-born husband is a possible President
of these United States. Any one of these girls
may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere
of human activity so exalted that she may not
be called upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher
interest. The education of our community to all
that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through its
women, and that to a considerable extent by the
aid of these large establishments, the least perfect
of which do something to stimulate the higher
tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes
there is, perhaps, reason to fear that girls will be
too highly educated for their own happiness, if
they are lifted by their culture out of the range of
the practical and every-day working youth by
whom they are surrounded. But this is a risk we
must take. Our young men come into active life
so early, that, if our girls were not educated to
something beyond mere practical duties, our material
prosperity would outstrip our culture; as
it often does in large places where money is made
too rapidly. This is the meaning, therefore, of
that somewhat ambitious programme common

to most of these large institutions, at which we
sometimes smile, perhaps unwisely or uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of
instruction went on at the Apollinean Institute
much as it does in other schools of the same class.
People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if
we contrast extremes in pairs. They approach
much nearer, if we take them in groups of twenty.
Take two separate hundreds as they come, without
choosing, and you get the gamut of human
character in both so completely that you can
strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect
unison with corresponding ones in the other.
If we go a step farther, and compare the population
of two villages of the same race and region,
there is such a regularly graduated distribution
and parallelism of character, that it seems as if
Nature must turn out human beings in sets like
chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which
Mr. Bernard now found himself had a pleasing
danger about it which might well justify all the
fears entertained on his account by more experienced
friends, when they learned that he was
engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The
school never went on more smoothly than during
the first period of his administration, after he had
arranged its duties, and taken his share, and even
more than his share, upon himself. But human
nature does not wait for the diploma of the Apollinean

Institute to claim the exercise of its instincts
and faculties. These young girls saw but
little of the youth of the neighborhood. The
mansion-house young men were off at college or
in the cities, or making love to each other's sisters,
or at any rate unavailable for some reason or
other. There were a few “clerks,” — that is,
young men who attended shops, commonly called
“stores,” — who were fond of walking by the Institute,
when they were off duty, for the sake of
exchanging a word or a glance with any one of
the young ladies they might happen to know, if
any such were stirring abroad: crude young men,
mostly, with a great many “Sirs” and “Ma'ams”
in their speech, and with that style of address
sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if
the salesman were recommending himself to a
customer, — “First-rate family article, Ma'am;
warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and
three quarters in this pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I
have the pleasure?” and so forth. If there had
been ever so many of them, and if they had been
ever so fascinating, the quarantine of the Institute
was too rigorous to allow any romantic infection
to be introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with
a good-looking, well-dressed, well-bred young
man, who had the authority of a master, it is
true, but the manners of a friend and equal, moving
about among these young girls day after day,
his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with

theirs, his voice growing familiar to them, never
in any harsh tones, often soothing, encouraging,
always sympathetic, with its male depth and
breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as
if it were a river in which a hundred of these
little piping streamlets might lose themselves;
anybody might see what would happen. Young
girls wrote home to their parents that they enjoyed
themselves much, this term, at the Institute,
and thought they were making rapid progress in
their studies. There was a great enthusiasm for
the young master's reading-classes in English
poetry. Some of the poor little things began to
adorn themselves with an extra ribbon, or a bit of
such jewelry as they had before kept for great occasions.
Dear souls! they only half knew what
they were doing it for. Does the bird know why
its feathers grow more brilliant and its voice becomes
musical in the pairing season?

And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town,
where a mere accident had placed Mr. Bernard
Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive
materials which might at any time change its Arcadian
and academic repose into a scene of dangerous
commotion. What said Helen Darley,
when she saw with her woman's glance that more
than one girl, when she should be looking at her
book, was looking over it toward the master's
desk? Was her own heart warmed by any livelier
feeling than gratitude, as its life began to
flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky

again looked bright and the flowers recovered
their lost fragrance? Was there any strange,
mysterious affinity between the master and the
dark girl who sat by herself? Could she call him
at will by looking at him? Could it be that
—? It made her shiver to think of it. — And
who was that strange horseman who passed Mr.
Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like
Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at
the witches' Sabbath-gathering? That must be
the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her,
they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival,
if one took a fancy to the dark girl! And who is
she, and what? — by what demon is she haunted,
by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is
she followed, by what destiny is she marked, that
her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and
that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye
glitters always, but warms for none?

Some of these questions are ours. Some were
Helen Darley's. Some of them mingled with the
dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night
after meeting the strange horseman. In the morning
he happened to be a little late in entering the
school-room. There was something between the
leaves of the Virgil which lay upon his desk. He
opened it and saw a freshly gathered mountain-flower.
He looked at Elsie, instinctively, involuntarily.
She had another such flower on her
breast.

A young girl's graceful compliment, — that is

all, — no doubt, — no doubt. It was odd that the
flower should have happened to be laid between
the leaves of the Fourth Book of the “Æneid,”
and at this line, —
A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed
through the master's mind, and he determined to
try the Sortes Virgilianæ. He shut the volume,
and opened it again at a venture. — The story
of Laocoön!

He read, with a strange feeling of unwilling
fascination, from “Horresco referens” to “Bis
medium amplexi,” and flung the book from him,
as if its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons
that princes die of.